Stick to EU4 for the time being
This game tries to be everything but fails at being at least something. Half the features can be automated for some reason, why bother with the markets and economy when you can just press one button and the game will do it for you?
Exploration is lazier than the previous installment, you have more regions to explore sure, but you once again press one button, send a random character out and in a few months' time terra incognita will be lifted. There's also no limit to colonies, which is kinda good but also bad, as literally anyone with enough cash inflow can colonize anything within their colonial range. Even restricting colonisation through settings you still end up with Papal Brasil and English Archangelsk for god knows what reason
Nations do not form, the map remains very static. I played at least 3 campaigns and I had to manually "inject some juice" into the game by forming countries through console commands, because Britain doesn't form by 17th century, Poland is annexed by Lithuania but PLC doesn't form either, Russia never materialises, the damn Ottomans, the entire reasoning behind the discovery of the new world never forms, they just stick as a beylik somewhere in Anatolia. Byzantium never falls, France never repels the English, the 100 Years' war lasts for fall too long, in one campaign I had the maximum of 7 stages different 100 Years' war CB wars on France, and neither England nor France duked it out by the end.
Situations make no incentive to pay attention to them, they just progress and then... Nothing happens? The protestant reformation never triggers the 30 years' war, Lutherans never spread that far either
Government mechanics are absolute abysmal ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ as well, what do you mean it takes me, Novgorod, to core Pskov, which has the same culture and religion as me, which has my claims over it, up to several years? In EU4 this system worked better, sure mana is bad and all but I much rather wait 24 months than 24 years for my advisors to do anything of value. EU5 promotes a completely different style of gameplay - where you spam vassals and integrate them later, rather than conquering provinces directly, which is kinda cool but I would prefer to actually do some conquering from time to time.
Parliament, why the ♥♥♥♥ does it even exist as a MANDATORY mechanic for all nations? Even if you're an absolutist monarchy - you still have a damn parliament, even if you abolish all councils and have estates under your boot - you STILL have a damn parliament. It also doesn't work, you use it to generate CBs and ask for levies, that's kind of it, there's no option to disable it and no option to either not use it or make it more useful, you have to use it or suffer a stability hit
The main issue with this game overall is that it tries too hard to be a sandbox, there's barely any interesting events and the AI is so dumbfounded that it can't do anything. The only driving force in this game is the player, which wasn't like that in EU4 - surely the player had a large effect on the world, but you still competed against other powers and had to plan tactifully to avoid unwinnable situations. EU5? Just paint the map lmao, then wait for the coalition to dissipate, rinse and repeat while other powers struggle to keep themselves afloat
Also the UI is genuenly terrible and looks like a mobile game got ported over to a PC, EU4 was much cleaner, stylized and you intuituvely know where and what is located. Here it's a whole garbled mess of buttons, character portraits and vital information hidden behind 10 layers of nested tooltips. If I want to count my enemy's forces in EU4 - I'll just open the diplo view, see their current army strength and reserves, compare to mine's and that's just it, now I have the info I can use to plan my next steps. Here I genuienly don't even remember how can you compare your forces other than the arbitrary meter telling you "You are much weaker" or "They are no match for us" or whatever, that tells me nothing, I want the damn numbers
One final note is optimization, it is absolute abysmall ass. At first the game runs normally, but by the end of the game it becomes absolutely unbearable, which is kind of a classic Paradox moment but I can't remember EU4 lagging THIS badly and becoming unplayable. I had to abandon my first two campaigns in 1600s, while I usually play the majority of my EU4 campaigns to the end, or at the very least to late 1700s. The change of the start date doesn't help much, in fact it makes things worse by adding 100 extra years of nothing happening. Sure there's black death, but it only sets you back in development. Just what do you do with this extra time? Siege a couple more forts? 1444 start date was perfect with Ottomans on the rise and the first explorations occuring shortly, you have the time to set up your nation in the first few years, then do whatever you desire, with mission trees guiding you and giving you pretty good buffs. Here you're just dropped with nothing to do, I guess that's fine - you set up your own goals, but cutting out mission trees and adding 100 years extra for no particular reason is not fun or engaging in my opinion
Overall, just stick to EU4, even after countless updates and years post-release - this game is still barebones and not worth the time, despite being Paradox's magnum opus
Oh and also yeah pay for like 50 DLCs for extra content that should've been a part of the game, if not at launch then at least much later
